We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot.
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his British sky.
—Emily Dickinson, “March"
New & Available Now
Four Large Watercolour Motifs of Rudolf Steiner
With a Lecture by Rudolf Steiner on Raphael
Edited by Peter Stebbing
The paintings reproduced in this book—also including a selection from the work of the painter Gerard Wagner—are images that arise out of direct color experience that possess “imaginative” character in Rudolf Steiner’s sense. The purpose of this volume is to focus on the unique possibilities that can open up for the future of art in the world and become a means and path for spiritual-scientific inquiry.
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“The art of the future will be an art of inner maturity. What leads to artistic activity will be sensed only at a relatively advanced age in life. It will no longer be assumed that one cannot have the necessary youth forces for artistic creation in later years—as is still often asserted today. It will be found that only by way of inner deepening augmented by spiritual scientific insight are the forces released that lead to artistic creation.”
—Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, February 7, 1915
From The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
Art and Theory of Art
Foundations of a New Aesthetics
Translated by Dorit Winter and Clifford Venho
An Author’s Summary, 1888
Four Essays Written between 1890 and 1898
Eight Lectures between 1909 and 1921 (CW 271)
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Take the Platonic Year. The sun rises in a particular sign of the zodiac. The vernal equinox advances. In ancient days, the sun rose in the sign of the bull, then in Aries, now in Pisces. Modern astron- omy makes schemes. This vernal equinox seems—admittedly, it only seems so, but that is not the point—to go around the entire sky; it moves around, then after a substantial number of years, it arrives back at the same point—that is, after 25,920 years. The Platonic Year is reckoned as 25,920 years! Take a human day of 71 years: it numbers 25,920 individual days. Take a single twenty-four-hour day in the life of a human being: it numbers 25,920 breaths. You see that we are incorporated into the cosmic rhythm. I believe—and from this point of view, many observations of this sort could be made—that there is no abstract religious idea that could evoke as much fervor as the consciousness of having one’s own outer, physical organism placed in such a way into the macrocosm, into the cosmic structure. The clairvoyant tries spiritually to penetrate this being-placed-into the cosmos. It works itself out in our inner music. What emerges from the organism there, what surges up into the soul—the resonance of the soul, the resonating with the cosmos—is the unconscious element of artistic creation. The whole world resonates when we create in a truly artistic way.
—Rudolf Steiner, lecture of June 1, 1918, in Art and Theory of Art: Foundations of a New Aesthetics (CW 271)
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